The web became a sexists

Posted by
/ 19-Feb-2017 09:42

the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact.With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them.But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as far.Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required. Like the black working class, the white working class originated in bondage—the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture.

The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery.(“If white slavery be morally wrong,” he wrote, “the Bible cannot be true.”) Nevertheless, the argument that America’s original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white labor by white capitalists—“white slavery”—proved durable.Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today.The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition.Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr.